Stress & Blood Sugar

Over the weekend I had some external stress that wreaked havoc on my blood sugar. Since my diagnosis it has been very rare the I've had a bs reading of over 200. When you have a sister whose a holistic medicine doctor, exercise and nutrition guru you tend to become really good at counting carbs. So this weekend when I had 2 readings in the upper 100s and 2 readings above 200 I knew something must be up. I assumed by carb:insulin ratio couldn't have changed 10 units overnight and I wasn't eating any exotic foods, therefore I attributed the highs to some external stress. I don't want to go too much into my personal life but a canceled vacation can really affect a guy!

I've been reading alot about how stress can affect diabetes and trying to determine if stress can "cause" diabetes. While most of the literature I've read indicates stress can't cause type 1 diabetes but it can be the factor that makes the symptoms prevalent. In the period leading up to my diagnosis I had taken the GMAT twice, applied to 4 MBA programs, and had a major restructuring at work. It has become apparent that the combination of those factors led to the final shut down of the beta cells in my pancreas. While I no doubt had some sort of auto-immune issue that caused my body to attack the beta cells it was the external stress that brought on the final knock out punch. Although there is research that says stress has no effect on the onset of diabetes, I'm of the mindset that the extreme mental stress I put myself under for about a year was the equivalent of Michael Spynx making Mike Tyson wait about 45 minutes for their fight back in the early 90s - it riled him up and well 90 seconds later Tyson looked like the baddest man on the planet, so the stress made my t-cells attack my beta cells that much more violently.

This past weekend as my personal life was causing alot of emotional anguish my blood sugar was alot harder to control. To combat this I played some extra golf and then ran harder than normal on Tuesday. Previously my best half hour distance was 3.5 miles. Yesterday I shattered that by running 3.56 miles in 30 minutes; all the golf, time spent outside and hard run helped me put my blood sugar in check and reinforced my belief that through sweat and hard work diabetes is alot more manageable.

Getting Used to the Pump

Two things occurred in the past 24 hours that have completely convinced me to go on the pump. Last night I was battling some lows - my Dad's 66th birthday was last week and last night I was able to have a slice of cake with him. To account for the pizza my family had for dinner I took 6 units of novolog and added 4 units for the cake. I started to get a headache about an hour later but my bs was a manageable 157. A few hours later I had dropped all the way down to 55 and needed a full glass of orange juice and 3 glucose tabs to return to normal levels. I realized that if my pump was filled with saline and not insulin I simply could have reduced my basal rate for a 1/2 hour to account for my mistake with the bolus injection - way easier than eating a ton of food to counter the combination of lantus and novolog.

The other thing that sold me on the pump was my time at the driving range today. As I previously stated one of my biggest fears was being comfortable with the pump during athletic activity. After 4 orthopedic surgeries I decided to hang up the cleats and turn to lower contact sports for my athletic endeavors. One of my passions is golf and it is really important to me that diabetes interferes as little as possible with the game. Today was my first time swinging a club while trying out the pump and I was thrilled with the results. In 90 degree weather, sweating like Patrick Ewing in the 4th quarter the canula stayed in the entire time. I'll attribute the problems with the infusion site I had during my run to my ignorance/ inexperience in setting up the site. In the future I plan to use IV Prep, I need to do some more research on which infusion set to use, some people have recommended the Unomedical Comfort Set. So I think I'll give that a try when I get my real pump, I plan to tell Danielle first thing Tuesday morning to file the paperwork so I can get the Animas 2020.